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Following a meeting with representatives of the Central Bank of Brazil and government officials in November 2015, co-founder and CEO of Snapcard Michael Dunworth told Coinjournal that the knowledge of bitcoin was surprisingly high and “everyone was in town.” The Brazilian market remains among Snapcard’s top priorities.

In the interview Dunworth commented that currently Snapcard is the largest bitcoin wallet in Brazil:

“Brazil is one of our focuses as a company. I think we’re the largest wallet in Brazil now. There’s not really too many people in the space. I would be very hard pressed if someone is doing more volume than us as a bitcoin wallet at the moment.”

Snapcard is a start-up providing software tools for bitcoin integration for offline and online payments. In July 2015 the San Francisco-based bitcoin wallet teamed up with Alpha Payments Cloud to empower users of the AlphaHub online merchant platform to integrate bitcoin. Later, in November 2015, Snapcard joined efforts with the Brazilian mobile payments company PagPop in order to add a bitcoin payment option to PagPop’s standard payment offers and to enable 12,000 Brazilian businesses to receive bitcoin payments.

In an interview for Bitcoin Magazine at the time Dunworth commented on the possibilities the Brazilian market opens for bitcoin:

“We've been exploring the region of Brazil because it's got this perfect climate where bitcoin can flourish as a currency compared to the local currency that has been significantly devalued.”

Dunworth’s observations are ever more relevant now, as Brazil’s economy carries on weakening, the country facing the fastest inflation in 12 years and the deepest recession since at least 1901, as pointed out by Bloomberg.

Dunworth is not the only one who sees the enormous potential of the Brazilian market for bitcoin. Reporting on his observations from the Third Annual Latin American Bitcoin Conference in Mexico City, Trace Mayer reflected on the reasons for the increased bitcoin adoption in Latin American countries. In Mayer’s words “of anywhere in the world Brazil is probably where the most bitcoin activity is happening.” According to him, “the Brazilian market itself needs bitcoin” in order to help individuals as well as businesses to wire money internationally.

According to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index, the price of bitcoin has fallen to around $300 in the first exchange rate shift of 2015. The price of bitcoin fell by about $15 on January 3, reaching a low of $297.87.

The bitcoin-friendly online gold exchange Amagi Metals has announced that it will pay a portion of salary to its entire staff in Bitcoins. CEO Stephen Macaskill will accept $40,000 of his yearly salary in digital currency.